Maybe, If Only
by Writing Addiction
Summary: Cloud Strife was honestly used to being broken. Ever since he was a child, he had felt like some part of him was missing, like some malevolent force had sliced him open, ripped out a few essential pieces of his soul, and sewed him hastily back up again afterwards. Maybe, if only he knew why, he could heal himself.


Cloud Strife was honestly used to being broken. Never mind all the business with Shinra and Sephiroth and all the events that very nearly sealed the Planet into a fate of everlasting destruction and chaos: he had been damaged goods since day one. Ever since he was a child, he had felt like some part of him was missing, like some malevolent force had sliced him open, ripped out a few essential pieces of his soul, and sewed him hastily back up again afterwards. He had always pushed this nagging feeling aside as a young child, ignoring what he had then only perceived as a nebulous, perplexing sensation he couldn't even begin to understand. He didn't know exactly when the unnecessary self-blame and overwhelming feelings of guilt began, but he had never really managed to overcome them. Big shocker there.

He had thought leaving Nibelheim would help him-seeing the world and gaining, not only physical strength, but the inner strength and peace he had always sought after-but it didn't. Not really. He was always homesick, missing his mother and Tifa most of all, and although he trained hard and was proud of his achievements as an infantryman, it didn't take long at all for him to realize that his dreams of being in SOLDIER would never come true. He really was a fuck-up and a failure, and he'd never be strong enough to keep the promise he had made to Tifa that night on top of the water tower.

So all in all, Cloud was pretty used to being broken. He had come to accept that he would always be damaged in some way, that he would never be the person he wanted to be, and that he would only ever see the world as a gray-scale when everyone else seemed to see every vivid, breath-taking hue. But it wasn't until he worked for Shinra that he became aware of an additional defect in himself. Being a teenager surrounded mostly by other men who were mostly much older than him was difficult enough, but the conversation often swerved sharply into the vulgar during breaks or any other kind of free time they received. His comrades took an immensely perverse pleasure in bragging about their sexual exploits, and Cloud could never tell if they were telling the truth or if they were outright lying just for the sake of their egos. Some of the things they talked about doing, if they were even possible at all, sounded painful, disgusting, and downright unsanitary.

Cloud tried to slip away from those conversations when he could. Sometimes it just wasn't possible. During one particular training session, they were split into groups of four and told to spar until only one man remained standing. As fate would have it, the other men he was lumped in with were all at least a decade older and much stronger than him. The coward in him told him to throw the fight and save himself the trouble, but his pride wouldn't allow it. Listening to his pride earned him bruises and scrapes in a dozen places, a concussion, and the derision of his team-mates.

Sitting on the sidelines after his painfully embarrassing defeat, a few of the other men struck up the usual dirty conversation. Cloud attempted to move away from them as quietly and unobtrusively as he could, but one of them-what was his name, Jackson, maybe?-caught him in the act. "Hey, Strife!" he called out. "Where d'you think you're going?"

Before he had a chance to think of a convincing lie, he heard someone else let out a gruff bark of laughter. "Little faggot's probably meetin' up with his boyfriend."

Cloud frowned, fighting a blush. "I'm not gay," he argued, his hands curling into tight fists at his sides. And even if he was, he always wanted to add but never did, it wasn't something to be ashamed of.

Another of them, the one that everyone called Fireball for reasons he was pretty sure he didn't want to know, walked over to him, slung an overly-muscled arm around his shoulders, and pulled him back into the group. "Look, kid, I'm just concerned for you, alright? You spend way too much time alone in the dorms, and I've never seen you go out for a night on the town with any of guys, you know what I'm sayin'? You're, what, fourteen or fifteen? It can't be healthy for a growing boy in the smack goddamn middle of puberty to keep all that energy pent up all the time."

Someone from behind him muttered something about the state of his right hand, which caused the whole group to break out into raucous laughter. Fireball smirked. "Listen, Strife, truth time: how many girls you ever been with?"

The blush he'd been holding back burst through his mental defenses and stained his cheeks bright red. He managed to get out a supremely intelligent, "Uh..." before Fireball interrupted him.

"Yeah, gonna take that as a big fuckin' goose egg. Kid, come on, you gotta get out there and do your thing. Be a man. You're a fuckin' teenager, you should be nailin' every little slut you can find!" Fireball sighed, shaking his head. "Spanking the monkey's all well and good, but you gotta just get out there and play hide the sausage with a pretty girl sometimes, amirite or amirite, guys?"

Everyone else started laughing and elbowing each other again, like it was some kind of joke Cloud wasn't in on. He felt his cheeks burning and tried to make his escape while his companions were busy wagging their eyebrows and guffawing, but the one who might be named Jackson stopped him with a stinging clap on the back. "Take it easy, tiger, we're just playin' around with you. And I think I could safely say that a few of us here would be more than willing to pitch in and buy you a gift from the Honey Bee Inn. For your health and sanity, if nothin' else."

The cringe he had been suppressing since the beginning of the conversation apparently broke free, because Fireball let out a long series of epithets and slurs that made Cloud sick to hear. As he walked away from the group, they shouted innuendos and other rude phrases at him. He heard someone say that he wouldn't even know what to do with a girl if he ever managed to get one. Someone else just kept calling him an ass bandit.

Later that night, he heard a knock on his bedroom door. When he opened it, he saw that Jackson had made good on his promise of a 'present.' The lady was pretty enough, but Cloud's first thought at seeing her was to wonder how she didn't twist her ankles with every step wearing boots with heels that high. She was, however, very good at her job, and Cloud figured that maybe Fireball and Jackson and the others were right. Maybe he needed to loosen up. Maybe just this once wouldn't be so bad.

He woke up the next morning feeling sick and ashamed of himself, and he dreaded seeing the other men in his squad and being subjected to the numerous wolf whistles and vulgar gestures that he knew would come, so he skipped out on training that day. Instead, he walked through Midgar all day long, window shopping, wasting time, and stopping for a moment to swing on the playground in Sector 6, all the while contemplating his apparent failings as a "real man." Maybe he was gay, after all. Not that he hadn't enjoyed the previous night to an extent, but it hadn't felt right somehow. Everyone else talked about how great sex was, how much more preferable it was to any other activity besides eating and getting hammered. It hadn't been for him. It was just...okay.

His commanding officer reamed him in front of the entire squad the next day for his absence. His grunts of "yes sir," "no sir," and "won't happen again, sir," seemed to placate him enough to not dole out additional punishment. Fireball appeared at his side while running laps and asked if he'd liked his gift. He lied, and amidst the usual barrage of innuendo he only vaguely understood, he managed to fall behind and get away from the conversation without any hindrance. He had to put up with elbows prodding his shoulder and obscene congratulations for a few days, but eventually they stopped teasing him. Or rather, they went back to teasing him about the lack of girls in his life and their loud assumptions on how often he masturbated.

He met Zack Fair a few months after that, and he couldn't have asked for better luck. Zack was older and cool and in SOLDIER, and he was everything Cloud could have wanted in a best friend. They didn't actually hang out that much; Zack was a SOLDIER, after all, and had his responsibilities to Shinra to take care of first and foremost, and besides, Zack had a girlfriend. He talked about her a lot sometimes, and Cloud could tell he loved this girl a lot. His initial feelings of happiness for his friend eventually gave way to an odd, irrational sort of jealousy. Zack was a grown man, and had the right to do whatever he wanted, date whoever he wanted, and above all, had the right to be absurdly in love with whoever he wanted. It was stupid. It was insane.

It was, he realized during training one day, a_ crush_.

He was angry, at first. He didn't really know with whom or at what, but he was angry. Probably at himself. He didn't speak to or message Zack for days. He spent all his free time sitting on his bed, ostensibly reading, but only flipping a page here or there when he heard his roommate's footsteps get close to the door. He sat there, alone and angry, wondering if he was gay, wondering why he had never felt like this before, and wondering how the men in his squad had known about it before him. He'd always assumed that sexual orientation was one of those things people just _knew_ about themselves, like how you still know where your limbs are when you close your eyes or how you know when someone's watching you from across the room. How could he have not _known_?

But then there was Tifa, back in Nibelheim, whom he missed the most out of anyone. He'd always assumed what he felt for Tifa was what people called a crush, but it was different than what he felt about Zack. He tortured himself for days about it, flipping between prospective labels more often than he had the patience for.

Jackson noticed he was unusually withdrawn and inquired about it. To be more precise, he asked Cloud if he needed any help pulling the gigantic stick out of his ass, to which one of Fireball's buddies had responded with, "Knowing that poof, he'd probably like it."

He fractured one of the bones in his hand giving that guy a bloody broken nose, but it was _so_ worth it.

In the end, he decided not to worry about the terminology anymore. Zack had that girl, whatever her name was, and he was happy, and that was all Cloud really cared about. Tifa probably had someone else by now, and she was probably happy, and that was all Cloud really cared about. There was no use to worry about giving his emotions a language. He was most likely never going to voice them, so why worry about putting them into words?

Why he was picked to accompany Sephiroth and Zack to Nibelheim, he will never know. A large part of him was terrified when he received the assignment, because going to Nibelheim meant letting everyone see that he had failed to make it into SOLDIER. They would all be so disappointed in him, especially Tifa. He had _promised_ her, damn it. His solution had been to wear his helmet the entire trip. It worked, sort of, but then they got up to the reactor and he had to stay outside to guard Tifa and he wished more than anything he could just fall down dead where he stood. She was beautiful, blossoming and cheerful and strong, and he fell in love with her. Maybe someday he could make it into SOLDIER and come back to her, but until then, he had to remain in her memory as the anonymous grunt who made sure she didn't sneak into the reactor and sell Shinra's trade secrets.

The sequence of events after that will probably always be a bit hazy to him. Even so, he would never be able to forget the pain and panic and betrayal he felt as Sephiroth set fire to Nibelheim and took refuge at the reactor. Zack followed him, and so did Tifa, and by the time Cloud got there, he was scared it was too late. Tifa was lying there on the cold metal floor, blood gushing much too quickly from the gaping wound in her abdomen, and it was just his luck that Zack had left the only Restore materia they'd brought with them back at the inn.

Everything after that was white-hot and staticky, right up until he regained consciousness outside of Midgar. Seeing his best friend lying on the ground, riddled with bullet holes and barely alive, was like a suckerpunch to the stomach, and he wasn't really sure how long he sat there trying to pretend the tears pouring down his bloody cheeks were simply raindrops hitting his face. By the time the storm had passed, he was ready. He resolved that, this time, he would be strong enough to keep his promise. He would be a legacy, the proof that the beautiful person now dead before him had once been alive.

His resolve had to turned into a quiet form of madness. It had helped him somewhat, he supposed, and besides, there was nothing he could do about it now anyway. He carried inside him Zack's desire to be a hero, which his twisted mind somehow translated into "mercenary," and that was motivation enough at first to help Barrett Wallace and his deranged crew to blow up a couple of mako reactors.

He would never have guessed that he would see Tifa there in Midgar. If it weren't for her insistence, he probably would have taken his money and gone elsewhere, and the fate of the Planet may have been a very different thing indeed.

He had nearly forgotten about the inner turmoil he'd experienced as a teenager by then. He had more important things to worry about, like whether or not Sephiroth, a man he once idolized, was going to succeed in destroying the Planet. For the longest time, he refused to admit even to himself that he was developing an emotional attachment to Aerith, and by the time he did, they were already making their way up north to the Forgotten City. It was the second time he'd been forced to watch someone he loved die right before his eyes as he stood helpless, and the familiar pain that seared through him was no less intense this time than it had been the first time.

No one in the party talked unless it was absolutely necessary afterwards. They came around eventually, timid at first and hyper-aware of Aerith's absence, but they all managed to move past it. They had no other choice. Sephiroth wasn't going to wait it out while they mourned. It was either move on or die, and as callous as it may have seemed at the time, there really was no other choice.

Cloud dealt with being forced to go on by taking his feelings out on monsters, and Vincent probably did the same. It was hard to tell about Vincent. Tifa became even more of a mother hen to the group than she had been. Yuffie took to jumping around and generally making a fool of herself, probably to encourage everyone to laugh again, and Cait Sith tended to poke fun at her, probably for the same reason.

Barret and Cid, on the other hand, decided that the best way to fight their misery was to tell the most outrageous dirty jokes they could. It was funny at first, apparently, because the others would laugh. The laughter eventually settled into half-amused chuckling, and from there into rolling eyes and blank stares. He tried not to mind, he really did, but the constant fear that anything he said could be turned into an innuendo grated at his nerves after a while.

One day, they got into a contest to see who could think up the most vulgar joke.

"Okay, okay, I got one," Cid said, holding his hands out in front of him as if he were a magician before a slight-of-hand. "How is a pussy like the weather?"

Barret rolled his eyes and scoffed. "How's that?"

"When it's wet, you know it's time to get inside."

Several minutes of obstreperous howling followed, ended only when Barret got an idea and grabbed Cid's shoulder. "No, no, no, I got one, I got a good one." He cleared his throat, pausing to let his giggles subside. "What's the difference between Spiky-Ass up there and an egg? An egg gets laid before it cracks!"

Cloud stopped dead in his tracks. "That's not funny," he remarked, turning towards his companions.

"The hell it ain't!" Barret shouted. "Come on, Cloud, ain't nobody here who don't know you haven't got none since we started all this shit."

Cid guffawed loudly. "Hey, it's not his fault. He's from Nibelheim, after all, and you can't very well fuck a Chocobo that you been riding on all damn day."

"Cid," Tifa groaned, "that's disgusting."

"Aww, c'mon, Tifa, Cloudy here knows we're just messin' around." Cid hooked an arm around Cloud's neck and ground his fist into the top of Cloud's head. "Ain't that right, little buddy?"

Cloud pulled himself out of Cid's grasp and pushed him away. "It's not funny. Not everything's about sex, you know."

He had hope the silence he was met with would be permanent, but given a few moments, both older men broke out in laughter again. "What kind of naive fool _are_ you?" Barret asked.

Thankfully, Tifa intervened. "I think you and Cid should stop making demeaning jokes about the man who is responsible for your lives right now. He's the one carrying the rations and the restoratives, you know."

The jokes didn't end, but they did become less frequent. In time, everyone's focus shifted to the task at hand, to saving the world. After all the travelling and fighting, just when they thought that they failed and that the only destiny for the Planet was death, they saw the Lifestream burst out of the earth. The Planet saved herself. The road from there was more difficult than anyone imagined, but they made it through by relying on each other.

There were more threats, but none of them quite as severe as the original. Kadaj came and was defeated, and so were the DeepGround forces and Omega WEAPON. Life eventually settled back into place. The citizens of Gaia were alway on edge, waiting for some new force to threaten their lives, but none ever came.

And life getting back to normal meant that Seventh Heaven and the delivery service were running full speed, which meant that Cloud had plenty of time and opportunities to think about his feelings for Tifa. It was more than a crush, more than love now. They'd fought together to save the world, and in the process had formed a bond that was nearly impossible to break. For all intents and purposes, they had children together. They were a family, whether he wanted to admit it or not, and he really was surprised to find that he wanted nothing more than to be her family.

He'd always been terrible at expressing himself, but he managed it somehow. The dynamic between them changed rapidly, but underneath there was still the bone-deep trust there had always been. Nothing in the world could have made him happier.

His unease about their relationship first began when he noticed her touching him more. It wasn't really a big deal-she held his hand sometimes when they went out, or booped his nose first thing in the morning when he was having trouble waking up, or kissed him goodbye when he left the house. But the touching turned into caressing and the kissing turned hot and passionate, and Cloud could only ever think of that girl from the Honey Bee Inn and how sick he'd felt afterwards, and how he could_ never_ do that to Tifa.

He broke away from the kiss. He was okay with kissing, but he knew that Tifa would eventually want more. "I'm sorry, Tifa, I can't-I can't do this."

He noticed that her lips were swollen and pink. "Can't do...what?"

He gestured uselessly between them. "This. Whatever you call this. I mean, it's not the _this_ that bothers me, but I don't know if I can handle the _other_ stuff."

Tifa looked confused for a moment. "You mean sex?" she asked.

"I..." He sighed, running his hand over his face. What kind of a guy _didn't_ want sex? "Yeah, I guess so."

"So…are you asexual, then?"

"Am I _what_?"

Tifa smiled and took one of his hands in hers. "Asexual. It refers to people who don't experience sexual attraction."

He opened his mouth and took a breath, intending to deny it and move on with a new topic of conversation, but something inside of him slid neatly into place and it was like there was this blinding light surrounding him, and in that light, he found peace and understanding and acceptance. He wanted nothing more than to throw himself headlong into it. "That's...that's a thing?"

Tifa chuckled under her breath and nodded. He half-expected her to say more, to dive into a more elaborate explanation, but she didn't. He was glad she didn't. His mind was racing, turning this new knowledge over and examining it like a fossil or a precious gem. Tifa just sat there, her fingers laced through his, and let him take the journey at his own pace. "But I..."

"Hmm?"

He didn't realize that he had been holding his breath until it burst out of him in a defeated sigh. "I...I've been in love. I mean, before this-this 'us' thing right now."

"I know." There was no judgement, no jealousy, in her voice, just a calm statement of fact.

"No, I mean, before...before her, too." Maybe one day he'd be able to say Aerith's name aloud without feeling awash with guilt, and maybe one day he'd be able to tell Tifa about Zack as well. Today was not that day.

"It doesn't matter," Tifa said, shrugging lightly.

"But-"

"Sex and love aren't mutually inclusive. You can have one without the other. That's why one-night stands happen. Why can't it also work in reverse?"

A thousand different emotions overwhelmed him all at once, and it was all he could do to lean back in his seat and stare up at the ceiling. His hand seemed to cover his eyes of its own accord. When his thoughts had slowed down enough to form a coherent sentence, he leaned forward, planting his elbows on his knees and letting his hands run through his hair. "You're not joking."

"No," she affirmed. "It's a real, actual thing that real, actual people really, actually feel." Tifa's thumb wiped away a tear he hadn't realized was dripping down his face. "I'm sorry, sweetie."

"No," he exclaimed, "no, don't be. I just...I never knew that..." _That other people felt the same way I did. That I wasn't on the outside of some universal secret everyone else seemed to know._

As if she were privy to his thoughts, Tifa rubbed his back soothingly, like a mother does her child after a nightmare, and, in a quiet, reassuring voice that he would ever remember as being much bolder and more profound than it was, said, "You're not broken, Cloud."

He choked on his breath, his body simultaneously gasping with epiphany and heaving a great sigh of relief. _Broken._ Of all the words she could have chosen, she had told him that he wasn't broken. He was, though, in so many ways, but not here. In this one aspect of himself, he could erase everything he had ever thought and replace it with the knowledge that his feelings weren't invalid. He was not broken.

He felt his eyes well up with tears, and his first instinct was to fight against them. He had never been very good at crying: boys in Nibelheim were taught that crying was unmanly, a display of weakness, and his time spent at Shinra had driven that lesson painfully home too many times. He tried to grasp for words, to reassure Tifa he was okay, to express how grateful he was that she had explained all this to him, to use speech as a method of forcing his tears into submission, but he found nothing. A sharp pain in his chest reminded him that breathing was a good idea, and perhaps it was the sudden overabundance of oxygen, or perhaps it was just giving his brain a moment to calm itself down, but in the span of a few breaths, he reached for the right words and they came to him immediately. "I love you, Tifa."

Her smile was, hands down, the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. "I love you, too, Cloud."

"Just..." He turned to her and buried his face into her shoulder and let the tears flow freely. She hugged him to her chest and kissed his forehead and cradled him like an injured animal. But he wasn't.

"What is it?" she whispered.

"Don't make me watch you die, too, Tifa."

Cloud Strife was honestly used to feeling broken. He came from a broken home; he carried with him a myriad of broken memories; and he had a hell of a broken past. Ever since he was a child, he had felt like he was incomplete. But now he knew that, although he had faults and regrets that scored his soul like every person does, he was not as severely damaged as he had once thought. He could now look square in the face of whatever malevolent force his younger self had imagined and take back those stolen pieces. With Tifa's help, he could return them to their proper places. He might be scarred in his heart, yes, as permanently and visibly as the skin of Tifa's abdomen, but he was not, and never had been, broken.


End file.
